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The money gushing out of West Texas these days is that even a deadly highway does not stop people from escaping. The fracking boom destroys an essential part of the asphalt that runs from Pecos – the world's first rodeo – through an old ghost town to New Mexico. But even as the carnage is piling up, companies are growing like cacti along US Highway 285.
John Cantu, a 63-year-old gray-haired man born in northern Mexico, is one of those entrepreneurs. A look at me and he knew my sizes perfectly: size 32 inches, crotch 32 inches, medium size shirt.
I did not expect this kind of clothing expertise from a guy who sells clothes by the side of the road at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. While Cantu showed me the thousands of fire-resistant garments in his trailer, trucks carrying sand, water, and massive fracking equipment passed US 285.
Quartz / John Detrixhe
Cantu had the idea a few years ago, while he was buying industrial clothes from rag houses – warehouses that buy thousands of pounds of used clothing – to sell in Louisiana. After a while, customers began to ask him for fire-resistant clothes, known as FR in the business.
Cantu had never heard of this garment, which is sometimes made from synthetic fibers such as non-combustible modacrylic. He discovered that FR's demand came from the West Texas oil fields, where it is a standard problem for workers. He bought an inventory load to do a test near Pecos, and his FR is quickly sold, like a brilliant belt buckle in a rodeo.
"I said, that's it!" Says Cantu, also known nowadays under the pseudonym of FR Jean. "I would have liked to have done it earlier."
Now the hugger described as such is killing the oil industry.
People, mostly men, who work on the fracturing platforms often work 14 hours a day for two weeks, then a week. It simply makes driving to work dangerous, in the middle of exhausted drivers' gloves and heavy trucks. The newspapers dubbed US 285 "the road to death".
And then there is the work itself. At truck stops, you hear stories of men being crushed by machinery or poisoned by hydrogen sulfide gas. Workers find themselves covered with oil, mud and drilling fluids. The laundromat lines can stretch for hours. Some men throw their clothes instead of washing them.
"The poor guys, they work so much," said Cantu. After a while, he added, "This oil field would not work without Mexican nationals, God bless their souls. The majority of hard-working people are Mexican nationals. Are they legal? Do they have their papers?
Highway of death
I grew up near there, in a town called Fort Stockton, but I do not remember having driven the most treacherous part of the United States 285. Until recently, it was born. There was almost nothing there and what was there: a stretch of desert dotted with rusting industrial equipment – looked like something out of Mad Max movie. These days, the road is disintegrating from the daily bombardment of truck traffic. When someone finds a job that drives 285 US dollars, their families try to dissuade it. But it's hard to do when there is a lot of money to be made.
The US 285 is just one of the symptoms of the fracturing explosion in West Texas, which is so fierce that local infrastructure – schools, hotels, restaurants and roads – can not keep up. Road accidents in Reeves County, where a key stretch of the highway is located, have increased by 300% over the past decade, as oil spree gets worse.
The trick to avoid craters on the road, said one resident working in oilfield construction, is to memorize the location of the holes. "It's always hard to avoid them at night," he admitted. "This is not the only road in West Texas like this."
It's something I've heard from many truckers, like Miguel Saucedo. We met at a truck stop where he chatted with inexperienced drivers and ate a Tupperware lunch he brought home.
Saucedo has been working in West Texas for seven years, some on fracturing wells. Now he's doing "hot shot", which means he's pulling a 40-foot trailer that can carry 60,000 pounds. His job is to be available to transport, at any time, all the equipment necessary for the continuous operation of a platform, from tools to directional drilling tools. The biggest problem with his work is the novice drivers.
"They put their foot in the dashboard!", He said. "They forget that they have a trailer in the back. Big trucks, they do not brake as fast. "
Cowboy stickers in prayer
The largely empty landscape of the United States is strewn with equipment and supplies from fracking platforms, truck stops, and long rows of temporary housing known as "men's camps." Fracking for oil brings in natural gas, another valuable product, but for the moment lacks pipelines to bring gas to the market. Instead, it burns in giant flames like birthday candles.
West Texas is experiencing a boom every few decades during an oil rush, resulting in fortune seekers with. Many of them are young men who work on fracking platforms, earning up to $ 100,000 a year or more, but around the fields there are also armies of drivers of trucks, camp builders, specialized truck stoppers and other sturdy contractors. .
Quartz / John Detrixhe
In a bend next to a gas station, I saw a school bus turned into a cafeteria selling tamales. Nearby, there was a confusing pro-Trump RV flying and "Do not walk on me" flags that were almost completely covered with stickers (the Confederate flags and the slogan "Make America Great Again" were prominent).
I thought it had to be the work of an itinerant (and almost certainly armed) preacher of nationalism and far right politics. But it turned out that the stickers were for sale. The big smoker was a cheerful man with a green cartoon Martian tattooed on his scalp. He said that the prayer-cowboy sticker was probably the one that was the most popular.
Pilot Flying J
Aside from a real fracking platform, the best place to get an idea of the boom is a truck stop. Men, as often as they do not speak Spanish, put themselves in overalls with their company logo to buy food. The region lacks almost everything – Orla does not have a supermarket, a church, or even a bar – but it has an incredibly well-managed and polite truck stop, Pilot Flying J, which serves as a grocery store, restaurant, hangout and coffee for thousands of workers. There is no food for breakfast at 7 in the morning as the men start arriving at 4 in the morning. During the day you can buy a salad or a meatloaf and listen to a ceiling speaker that announces the availability of a shower.
Flying J, like the fracturing platforms, must import employees, many of whom are women, and house them in modular housing. It's a difficult sell because there is not much to do in Orla when you're not working. The workforce ultimately costs about 25% more than usual, but it's worth it because the company says these locations are among the most important outposts of Pilot Flying J.
Do not call it a "men's camp"
West Texas largely lacks the number of workers needed to meet the demand for truck drivers and workers on oil rigs. Employees are imported from other parts of Texas, from other states and from other countries. Sometimes they stay in hotels where the rate of increase reaches $ 300 per night or more, or in companies that host them in one of the caravan fleets – the accommodation camps – which were trucked to increase the housing stock.
In some camps, platform workers who work for 14 hours (or more) share a room and exchange after the end of one shift and the beginning of the other. The official population in Pecos, Texas is about 9,000 people. But, according to some estimates, the number of workers recruited to manage wells has doubled. "This oil boom has hit these cities like a tsunami," said Ralph McIngvale, a Permian Lodging partner.
I visited a Permian accommodation camp open to the public for lunch. Miki Bryce, a polite saleswoman with the look of a janitor, greeted me at the door even though I was not announced. She insisted that I eat a late lunch, then also insisted that any article mentioning Permal Lodging should not be termed a men's camp. The owners challenged an article by Bloomberg that mentioned it as such. "We are an exception," she said. "It's a lodge."
Quartz / John Detrixhe
Bryce stated that Permian Lodging was an alternative to other temporary accommodation options, with better chefs, very large gel-covered mattresses, a gym, high thread count sheets and movie theater. During my visit, men played billiards and televisions played football in the cafeteria, which served steak that day. "I hope you are a carnivore," said Bryce.
An ocean of oil
Texas is so rich in oil that it boils alone on the surface. West Texas and parts of New Mexico are home to the Permian Basin, a particularly abundant expanse of 75,000 km 2 which was a shallow seaway there 850 million to 1.3 billion. years ago, where seaweed and prehistoric life became the basis of what is today an ocean of underground oil.
Even after almost 100 years of drilling and extraction, the Permian is one of the most productive oil fields in the world, producing about 4.1 million barrels a day. One of the keys to the resurgence in Texas, of course, is hydraulic fracturing, that is, fracturing, whose roots go back to the days of Standard Oil, the monopoly created by John Rockefeller in 1870.
These days, the teams drill a deep vertical hole in the ground, then rotate the drill and chew horizontally across another mile of rock. The engineers then concoct a custom cocktail of water, sand and chemicals to blow into the subterranean formations under high pressure, releasing trapped oil and gas.
"It's like Los Angeles at rush hours."
The Permian is one of the main reasons why the United States is now the world's largest oil producer, accounting for 459 of the 990 installed in the United States, according to Baker Hughes, an oilfield services company. This is why Chevron and Occidental have been fighting this year against Anadarko Petroleum, a battle won by the executive director of Occidental Vicki Hollub by spending $ 38 billion, which earned him the valuable assets of his company Anadarko at the Permian.
About 60 oil rigs in the Permian Basin are concentrated in Reeves County, where Pecos and Orla are located. This is one of the few ways in which young people, most of them men with strong arms, can still earn a lot of money without university training.
On US 285, the traffic is constant. More roads, built by the roads department, are absolutely necessary. At the busiest point, the line of trucks is interrupted day and night. "It's like in Los Angeles at rush hour," said Shameek Konar, head of strategy at Flying J, the truck stop chain with Orla's extremely popular outpost.
The truckers said they were thankful for the repressive measures taken by the road patrols, forcing them to slow down and preventing them from trying to overtake too many cars at the same time on the road. But closing the road completely until it can be repaired seems out of the question. There is just too much money involved.
One afternoon, I was driving on US 285 and Trump was on the radio. He presented his often repeated rant about crime and drugs crossing the southern border, as well as about immigrants. I wondered how many undocumented workers were in the oil fields around me.
According to the Pew Research Center, Texas relies heavily on undocumented labor for agriculture, but the data suggests that it is much less prevalent in the fracturing industry. Jeffrey Passel, a senior researcher at Pew, estimates that there could be about 20,000 unauthorized immigrants working in the oil and gas industry in Texas. If that is correct, it would represent about 5% of fracturing workers.
This number is much smaller than all the people I interviewed supposed, some of them having talked about platforms where all the operations are conducted in Spanish. One possibility is that workers in West Texas greatly overestimate the number of undocumented immigrants in their teams. After all, multi-billion dollar energy companies have a lot to lose by using illegal employment practices. The other possibility is that undocumented workers are masked by layers of outsourcing and are not reflected in the surveys.
Boom and bust
Western Texans know that the boom will not last forever. They have already gone through many times before. They make money while getting it is good.
RF John is planning an expansion. He plans to sell food next to his clothes trailer. With the help of his wife, he stated that he wanted to manage the restaurant business around the clock. He can also open an account at Square to accept card payments, allowing customers to drag their account. professional credit card. It's not because he's afraid of being stolen – he says that even the "rascals of drugs" are making too much money to annoy a guy in a caravan stuffed with money.
"It will be exciting," he said. "I clean."
-With additional reports from Amanda Shendruk
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